From BBC News:
Police say a 28-year-old man has been arrested in South Yorkshire on suspicion of the murder of Ann Widdecombe.
“The suspect, who is a white British national, is now in police custody,” a statement from Devon and Cornwall Police said.
Police had announced as part of their appeal for information on Friday that they were looking for a white individual, and so the statement confirms that the suspect fits the description. And having gone that far, then why not add that the suspect is British as well?
The police statement is the latest example of the trend I noted last month in which police increasingly choose to disclose an arrested suspect’s ethnicity and nationality, rather than just age and sex. The purpose, of course, is to pre-empt or counter racist disinformation and incitement; but as I noted then, it comes with downsides. Online populists now routinely say that when ethnic information is not released then we can infer that an arrested suspect must be either from an ethnic minority or foreign, and that the identification of white suspects is unfair.
In this instance, the police statement can also be interpreted as an example of a slippery slope. Hitherto, the disclosure of the ethnicity and nationity of an arrested suspect has been associated with cases where there was overwhelming direct evidence that the police had arrested the right person. When Paul Doyle ran his car into a crowd in Liverpool in May 2025, it was immediately obvious that he had done it, whatever explanation he might put forward for his actions. And without prejudicing the Old Hurst Zoo incident, most people will be very surprised if it turns out that the boy was not in fact thrown into the crocodile enclosure, or that the wrong person has been identified as having done it. The suspects were apprehended at the scene, and there were multiple witnesses to what had happened.
However, the police could never state explicitly that this is why they judged it reasonable to disclose extra information about suspects. In real life, a suspect in one set of circumstances may be more obviously guilty than some other suspect in different set of circumstances, but it would be a “two-tier” and prejudicial approach for that to guide police policy about disclosures before an arrested suspect has even been charged, let alone tried in court. And a policy that is merely implicit is more likely to “creep” beyond its initial boundaries. The upshot is that we are now being told the ethnicity and nationality of a suspect who has been arrested only as the result of an investigative process, relating to an alleged murder which (as far as we know) was not witnessed by anyone.
That this is undesirable is illustrated by the fact that the 28-year-old suspect mentioned above is the second arrest relating to Ann Widdecombe’s death, after a 26-year-old man was arrested on Friday but released the following morning and discounted from the investigation. This first suspect was also described by police as a “white British man”, and the arrest excited demands for further disclosure by Reform ideologue Matt Goodwin:
It is absolutely critical — given the climate the mainstream media have whipped up in this country in recent months — that we are told EVERYTHING about the Ann Widdecombe murder suspect, the case, the context, all of it.
Clearly, it was not “absolutely criticial” for the police to provide more information about someone who turned out to have nothing to do with the case (1). The cases of Chris Jefferies and the wrongly identified “Gatwick drone” suspects come to mind. In both instances, arrests were seen as highly indicative of guilt.
Meanwhile, Tommy Robinson responded to news that the 26-year-old had been released by expressing the view that “Looks like they just grabbed the first white person they seen so they could say ‘white British male arrested'”.
Note
1. Complaints about “the mainstream media” from someone involved in Reform UK are grotesque given Nigel Farage’s role in validating disinformation following the Southport killing.
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